Deathstalker 07 - Deathstalker Return

it?" said Ramirez. "Sometimes it walks on the walls and the ceiling, and sometimes it sings a song that makes any listener's ears bleed, but that's about it."
    "Ah, well," said Finn. "Early days yet."
    In the next cell, the occupant had been turned inside out, all down one side. It sat very still in the middle of its cell, and didn't respond to any movements outside the force screen. The exposed organs were crimson and purple, pulsing with blood, wet and shiny. The single lung expanded and contracted smoothly. Sharp bone horns stuck out of the exposed gray matters of the brain. Where the genitals should have been there was only a twitching red mass. Tears ran steadily down the normal half of the face.
    "Is it in pain?" asked Finn.
    Ramirez shrugged. "It doesn't respond to questions. Either way, we have no way of reaching past the force screen to help. According to my files, it hasn't moved an inch in two hundred years. God alone knows what it's thinking."
    "Why would the Maze do something like that?" said Finn. "What purpose could it serve?"
    "I told you," said Ramirez. "The Maze is alien."
    In the next cell, a man ran back and forth impossibly quickly, his movements almost a blur. He pounded on the walls with his fists, which continually broke and bled and constantly healed. His mouth was stretched in an endless silent scream, his eyes utterly mad.
    "He can hear the whole Empire thinking," said Ramirez. "But he can't shut any of it out, even for a moment. He doesn't even know who he is anymore, his identity crushed under the weight of so many others."
    Finn looked at Dr. Happy. "Could you help him?"
    "I could have a lot of fun trying," said the good doctor.
    The next cell held a man who'd torn his own eyes out. Blood streamed endlessly down his jerking cheeks from the empty red sockets. But his wounded head turned unerringly to follow Finn as he approached the cell's force screen. When Finn stopped and looked in, the blind man came forward to
    face him.
    "I have to keep tearing them out," he said hoarsely. "Because they keep growing back. I see things.
    Terrible things. I see other planes, other dimensions, and other realities. I see the awful things that live there, twisting and turning, and the awful things they want to do, if they could only find their way here. I have seen the answers to Humanity's oldest questions, and secrets we were never meant to know… and I can't stop seeing! I tear my eyes out, and I can still see!"
    Finn backed away despite himself, and the man in the cell laughed hysterically. The laughter followed them down the aisle to the next cell.
    In this cell, the occupant was constantly changing. It stood very still, a blur of movement from one moment to the next as it became a woman became a man became a child became someone else. Short and tall, fat and thin, every race and color of Humanity, everyone and everything, forever changing.
    "We don't know whether any of those are real people," said Ramirez. "Whether they're copies of people from other worlds, or alternate time track versions of the original person, such as the blessed Hazel d'Ark is supposed to have produced, or whether these people are just generated from the original's imagination.
    None of them have ever stayed around long enough to be questioned. And before you ask, recording devices don't operate through the force screen. None of our instruments will. We have no way of running tests on any of the survivors. I'm not sure whether that's for their protection or ours."
    "Don't be defeatist, Doctor," said Finn. "One idea has already occurred to me. But let us press on, press on."
    The occupant of the next cell was fast asleep, curled up into a fetal ball, floating some two feet above the floor. Behind his closed eyelids, his eyes moved constantly.
    "He's been sleeping and dreaming for two hundred years," said Ramirez. "What can his dreams be like, after so long away from reality? We don't know if he'll ever wake up, or what he might be able to do when he does. Perhaps he's dreaming himself sane."
    The next cell contained a homicidal psychopath of such relentless ferocity that even Finn was impressed.
    The Maze survivor raged back and forth across his cell, murdering an endless number of people who seemed to appear out of nowhere just to die, and then vanish again. The killer's face was purple with rage as he battered people to death with his bare hands, or strangled them, or tore them limb from limb.
    "Again, we don't know whether